Field of the Invention
The embodiments are generally related to electricity outage management and more particularly to methods and systems for automated mapping of meters to transformer to substation with a high degree of certainty.
Description of the Related Art
Major electric utilities are working hard to improve outage management and reliability. One of the major investments they are making is in outage management systems which help identify and isolate outages. The major issue with these systems is the quality of source data, particularly their engineering model. What assets connect to each other is a major dependency for these investments to pay off, and big utilities have major errors in their connectivity models, creating “garbage-in, garbage-out” situations. That is, while smart meter and SCADA station data can be measured and are largely quantifiably accurate, the relational model that connects that data according to the electric delivery infrastructure in the field is inaccurate. More specifically, there is currently no automated (non-manual) process for mapping, with a high degree of certainty, an individual smart meter to the physical transformer to which it is connected and to which substation and phase that physical transformer is connected. This has led to an erosion of the value major utility digital investments can provide. Utilities are in need of a way to correct their connectivity models, and the process of “walking the lines” on thousands of circuits and millions of customers is economically unfeasable. There needs to be a data science way to discover errors and assert the “right” topology so that outage management system (“OMS”) investments can truly pay off.
A solution to this problem is difficult, it will take a clear understanding of electric infrastructure, energy dynamics, data integration, and data science to interpret numerous data relationships and identify errors in existing models. However, the company which can demonstrate this capability effectively will have solved an urgent problem in need of resolution at a wide range of utilities, which have few other alternatives to resolution. Multiple major investor-owned utilities have communicated this, and it can be seen in other market segments as well.